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“We all realized that we had oral interviews on cassette tapes (and) if we don’t hurry up and reformat them, we’re going to lose the information.” -Carol Waggoner-Angleton
Paintings, historical monuments and fossils are all things that come to mind when preservation is the topic, but cassette tapes, who would have thought?
Reese Library, Paine College’s Collins-Callaway Library, and the Augusta-Richmond Public Library joined forces to receive a $2,000 audiotape preservation grant from the Georgia Humanities Commission, which will allow for a selection of tapes from the three libraries to become digitized, according to Carol Waggoner-Angleton, the Special Collections assistant at Reese Library.
“We all realized we had oral interviews on cassette tapes (and) if we don’t hurry up and reformat them, we’re going to lose the information,” Waggoner-Angleton said. “So we went looking for some funding to have them reformatted to mp3 files that could easily be maintained over (a) long term and would be easier for people to research with.”
One of the reasons there is a need to digitize the tapes is because with cassette tapes, they need to be played on the machines they were created on, Waggoner-Angleton said. If they are played on different machines, then the old tapes have a greater chance of being destroyed.
“Every machine runs at a slightly different speed and when you are playing old and brittle tapes, if you do it on a machine other than the machine they were created on, they are more likely to break,” Waggoner-Angleton said.
Also by digitizing the tapes, listeners can hear the voices of the people speaking and the influxuations in their voices, therefore achieving a better understanding of what the person is saying. If people only had the manuscript, they would not be able to determine the speaker’s tone and know if the speaker was kidding or being serious, Waggoner-Angleton said.
But not all the tapes in the collections at the three libraries will be digitized, only a select few will be sent out due to the amount of money received by the grant, Waggoner-Angleton said. The tapes selected from each library were chosen for various reasons and the 10 tapes chosen from Reese Library are from the Eugenia Fulcher Collection.
“The Eugenia Fulcher collection is a series of oral interviews that she did for her doctorate dissertation interviewing teachers who taught in one-room school houses, elementary school houses, in Burke County before the end of school segregation,” Waggoner-Angleton said. “We took a small subset of this (and) are looking at someone called the Jean’s Teachers. These were like supervising teachers for a district and they were funded by a philanthropical group who was trying to provide more educational opportunities for rural African-Americans.”
For Lyn Dennison, the library director of the Collins-Callaway Library, the choice of which tapes to get digitized came down to what was interesting about the history of the school.
“We have a lot of student interviews with past graduates,” Dennison said. “This apparently was a project that took place in the late 1970s and they contacted graduates from the 1930s and ‘40s. Those people recalled some of their times here at Paine College, so that is kind of interesting to hear how things have changed there.”
As for Dorothy Demarest, the reference librarian at the Augusta-Richmond Public Library, the decision was not only because of interest, but more importantly, which tapes had a greater need to be saved.
“In the 1970s they got some money here to do some oral history,” Demarest said. “They asked various people around town to do the oral history and we saved them all the time, but they’re on little cassette tapes and a lot of them have deteriorated. I tried to transfer them myself, but there’s a lot of background noise and they need to be cleaned up. So what we want to do with this is digitize them and clean them up. One of them I picked because we don’t even have anything that will play it, it’s a reel-to-reel and it’s disintegrating so badly that if somebody professional doesn’t fix it up, it will be lost.”
Once all three libraries complete the process of preserving the tapes, the staff plans on having separate events to announce to the public the new digital items are available to listen to, according to Waggoner-Angleton. The dates for these events have yet to be determined, but if everything works outs accordingly, the events should begin by June or July with the Augusta-Richmond Public Library. Then a few months later, around November, the other two libraries will have presentations to announce their newest additions to their collections.